Medicine: Facts of LIFE

By a squeamish generation-before-last, “the facts of life” were considered shameful. That the process of which every human is a product is still considered so by countless people is not only a shameful but a dangerous state of affairs to U. S. doctors and health officers. Nevertheless, the old taboos die hard. Last week produced an interesting anomaly in the record of modern public health education: a four-page spread of text and pictures of how babies are born. Although it had been approved by the U. S. Post Office, it was banned by local law officers in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and some 60 other communities. No copies were permitted to cross the Canadian border. The birth pictures appeared in the April 11 issue of 17-month-old LIFE.

LIFE’S pictures were taken from an educational motion picture called The Birth of a Baby. Produced twelve months ago by the American Committee on Maternal Welfare, Inc. and sponsored by 16 medical and social service societies, favorably previewed by a majority of 12,000 doctors and clubwomen, the picture showed a woman’s life through pregnancy and childbirth (TIME, April 4). Climax of the film’s 72 minutes was the actual birth of a baby. Medical groups from the American Medical Association down endorsed the film, and its serious purpose: the reduction of sickness and death among mothers and offspring. Last week The Birth of a Baby was drawing crowds in Minnesota, but the problem of getting the picture past squeamish local censors had delayed its showing in many States, notably New York. At the suggestion of the film’s producers, LIFE reproduced 35 pictures from the cinema. The magazine notified its 650,000 subscribers in advance, so that they could decide whether or not to let their children see them, printed the pictures in centre pages so that they could be easily removed by family censors. The magazine’s print order, 2,040,000, was held to the previous week’s level.

Pittsfield, Mass, was the first to cry havoc. Police authorities in Boston and many another New England city jumped into line. New Orleans, one of the three cities west of the Mississippi which banned LIFE, used an 1884 statute to pull the magazines off the newsstands. In Tucson, only far-Western city to object, the publisher of the Arizona Star sold 25 copies of LIFE over his own counter in defiance of the police. The Memphis Press-Scimitar contrasted the local ban on LIFE with open sale at the same time of Sex Guide, The Nudist and Tattle Tales. Though William Jay Schieffelin, vice president of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, thought “LIFE rendered a public service by picturing in a decent way the facts about the birth of a baby which every child should know,” New York State’s Knights of Columbus complained to New York City’s five county district attorneys. Result was that District Attorney Samuel L. Foley of The Bronx arrested four news dealers for selling indecent literature. LIFE prepared to defend them, as it did dealers in Boston.

Meantime, preponderantly to LIFE’S defense sprang an articulate sector of the medical and social service professions. When the police chief of New Haven, Conn, confiscated copies and arrested a dealer, the testimony of two Yale medical professors and a Congregational minister persuaded a judge to dismiss the case. Said the minister, the Rev. Dr. Oscar Maurer: “The failure of parents to acquaint their offspring with the facts of life justifies public agencies doing so.”

The Hearst New York Journal and American was strong for suppression, but the New York Post wanted to know “Is Motherhood Indecent?” Said the Boston Traveler: “Every one of us was born. Is it any harm to know how?” Editor & Publisher, respected journalists’ journal, editorialized: “We can point to no better channel of education than pictures selected by an editor with a sense of decency, balance and intelligence.” Most belligerent in defense of LIFE was the Conference of State and Provincial Health Authorities of North America meeting in Washington this week. The Conference endorsed “the journalistic enterprise of LIFE magazine,” deplored the “attitude of officials who have tried to prevent the sale of LIFE. . . . This action in itself indicates the necessity for such public health education.”

To find out whether such facts of life could legally be kept from U. S. citizens, Publisher Roy E. Larsen this week agreed to a test arrest and trial in The Bronx. District Attorney Foley, who had told reporters he would personally arrest Publisher Larsen, passed responsibility to The Bronx grand jury when Mr. Larsen sold a copy of the banned LIFE to a detective while Mr. Foley looked on.